Biography
Dr Md Zakir Hossain is Senior Research Fellow at the School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences (EECMS) in the Curtin University (previously he was affiliated with Optus-Curtin Centre of Excellence in AI), Perth. His research focuses on developing advance technologies to solve health related problems through qualitative and quantitative research in responsive AI and responsible AI. His research direction leads in developing computer vision and privacy preserving AI approaches for health-related predictions of human internal states including affective computing, emotion recognition, and diagnosing and managing human diseases.
Prior to joining the position at Curtin University in January 2023, he worked as a Research Follow with Biological Data Science Institute (BDSI) at the Australian National University (ANU) and as a Visiting Scientist with Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Future Science Platforms (MLAI FSP), and Agriculture and Food business unit at CSIRO since January 2021. During the period, he developed biologically informed machine learning models for predicting Salmon gill diseases and Wheat traits. He also served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) at Macquarie University, Sydney. During the time, he helped in developing AI models for diagnosing COVID-19 securely from acoustics signals. From November 2018 to November 2020, he served as a Postdoctoral / Research Fellow and Lecturer at OHIOH (Our Health in Our Hands) Grand Challenge and Research School of Computer Science (RSCS), ANU. During this fellowship, he focused on building predictive models for people living with multiple sclerosis and/or diabetes. He also worked as a casual Human Centered Computing Support Officer at College of Engineering and Computer Science, ANU. He conducted data mining and machine learning based research for distinguishing between two visualizations (organizational and circular) from participants' pupillary responses and demographic data.
Zakir earned his PhD in computer science in July 2019 from ANU, with his research focused on developing machine learning models for human computing and cognitive science. He proposed a new machine learning approach to distinguish between real and posed smiles from participants’ emotional reactions to the two kinds of smiles. The emotional reactions were extracted from participants’ physiological signals and classified using different machine learning classifiers. The participants’ demographics data were also recorded and evaluated. He obtained Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) at Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET), Bangladesh. He applied a novel and robust optimization technique to select informative features from EEG signals and micro-array data at the time.
Zakir has taught over 20 university courses and supervised many students including PhDs, masters, and honors, in different universities since started in January 2012, including the University of Information Technology & Sciences (UITS) and Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET) in Bangladesh, University of Canberra, ANU, and Curtin University. He is an Associate Fellow of Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), awarded by the UK Advanced Higher Education Academy.
